A blog about societal, cultural, and civilizational collapse, and how to stave it off or survive it. Named after the legendary character "Crazy Eddie" in Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle's "The Mote in God's Eye." Expect news and views about culture, politics, economics, technology, and science fiction.

Thursday, June 5, 2014

NASA mid-year report and other space and astronomy news

The This Week At NASA crew is on a short mid-year hiatus -- but we thought we'd leave you with a quick look back at some of the big and exciting news featured so far in 2014 on This Week at NASA. We're back on June 13 with a fresh, new This Week At NASA.

Follow over the jump for news from distant galaxies to deep in the heart of Texas, where the stars at night are big and bright.

Zilong Li and Cosimo Bambi with Fudan University in Shanghai have come up with a very novel idea—those black holes that are believed to exist at the center of a lot of galaxies, may instead by wormholes. They've written a paper, uploaded to the preprint server arXiv, describing their idea and how what they've imagined could be proved right (or wrong) by a new instrument soon to be added to an observatory in Chile.

NASA's Swift satellite reported an enormous explosion occurred this morning at 8.15 AEST in our neighbouring galaxy, Andromeda. This explosion is known as a Gamma Ray Burst (GRB), one of the most powerful explosions in the Universe.

The exact cause is unknown but thought to be an explosion from when two Neutron Stars collide. These Neutron Stars are the dead cores of massive stars, with the mass of our Sun crushed into the size of a small city. When they merge together, the explosion is so powerful it can be seen from across the Universe.

Swinburne University of Technology astronomer Dr Alan Duffy says these GRBs explosions are so large that if they occur within our galaxy they can potentially trigger mass extinctions on Earth.

Next year, NASA will be sending an inflatable spacecraft to the ISS! Why are we using inflatable spacecrafts instead of the traditional spacecrafts? Trace explains how using inflatable objects will open up many new doors in space!

The Lynx Cub Payload Carrier (LCPC) developed jointly by the United States Rocket Academy and the Space Engineering Research Center, part of the Texas A&M Engineering Experiment Station (TEES), is a new research platform that promises to dramatically reduce space flight cost for small science and education payloads. Designed and fabricated by Texas A&M faculty, students and TEES researchers, the first LCPC was delivered recently and will fly on the XCOR Lynx spacecraft. XCOR Aerospace is an American private rocket engine and spaceflight development company.

"The LCPC is a versatile system that installs in the Lynx cabin and allows small experiments to be carried as secondary payloads on any Lynx flight," said United States Rocket Academy Chairman Edward Wright. "It can be installed and removed quickly for frequent, low-cost flight opportunities.